#AmericanWriters
The great bed of the world arching over graves over Babi Yar with its multitude of bones, with battalions of screams
‘Why do you have stripes in your forehead, Mama? Are you
The poet fears failure & so she says “Hold on pen— what if the critics hate me?”
I sit in the black leather chair meditating on the plume of smoke that rises in the air, riffling the pages of my life
center The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself. Not with a leather whip,
Handcuffed by time, I travel across this broad beautiful America– mesas, deserts, peaks with clouds caught
With his head full of Shakespeare… and old notions of poetic justice, he was ready with his elegies the day the ocean sailed into the… ‘The sea,’ he wrote, 'is a forgivi…
For Naomi Lazard Sometimes I can’t wait until I… —Naomi Lazard My friends are tired. The ones who are married are tired
Ash falls on the roof of my house. I have cursed you enough in the lines of my poems & between them,
Sometimes the poem doesn’t want to come; it hides from the poet like a playful cat who has run
In the redwood house sailing off into the ocean, I sleep with you– our dreams mingling, our breath coming & going
I sit at home at my desk alone as I used to do on many sunday afternoons when you came back to me,
I sleep with double pillows since… Is one of them for you-or is it yo… My bed is heaped with books of poe… I fall asleep on yellow legal pads… Oh the orgies in stationery stores…
Bobbing in the waters of the womb, little godhead, ten toes, ten fing… & infinite hope, sails upside down through the worl… My bones, I know, are only a cage
On the first night of the full moon, the primeval sack of ocean broke, & I gave birth to you